Ken O’Hare – A Retrospective of Calm in a City of Movement
For Kenneth O’Hare, the city was never simply a place of movement and noise. It was a site of contemplation — a space where silence could be found in steel, glass and light. A Gentle Man: A Retrospective of the work of Kenneth O’Hare, presented at Bridewell Studios & Gallery, offers the first comprehensive overview of an artist whose quiet, meditative vision of the modern city deserves renewed attention.
O’Hare’s paintings are rooted in a lifelong fascination with urban geometry. He looked upwards, past the clamour of street-level life, to the horizontal and vertical rhythms of skyscrapers that define the modern skyline. Inspired by the historical evolution of the high-rise — particularly the early twentieth-century race for height in cities such as New York and Chicago — his work explores architecture not as monument, but as lived space.
Central to O’Hare’s practice is a gentle tension between nature and artifice. Glass, in his work, becomes both barrier and threshold: a technological skin stretched to its limits, simultaneously reflecting sky and enclosing human activity. His canvases treat these transparent planes as minimalist units, each window or frame a carefully considered image within a larger composition. The result is work that feels both precise and quietly humane.
What distinguishes O’Hare’s paintings is their sense of rhythm. Daily life is present not through figures, but through implication — corridors, stairwells, reflected light — suggesting the invisible connections between people who share these towering structures. The skyscraper becomes an “invisible volume”, less a feat of engineering than a vessel for collective experience.
Light plays a crucial role throughout. O’Hare was fascinated by how illumination moves through urban space: absorbed into labyrinthine interiors, fractured by glass, or bounced back toward the sky. His paintings operate as experiments in perception, inviting the viewer to slow down and inhabit the calm he found within these environments.
This retrospective, organised to honour O’Hare’s memory, is the first exhibition to bring together his work in such depth. With the dedicated support of his twin brother, A Gentle Man offers a rare opportunity to encounter an artist who sought the sublime not in spectacle, but in stillness.
In a city often defined by reinvention and velocity, O’Hare’s work feels particularly resonant. His paintings ask us to pause, look up, and rediscover the spiritual quiet hidden within the architecture that surrounds us.
A Gentle Man: A Retrospective of the work of Kenneth O’Hare
23 January 2026 6 – 9pm (Opening Night)
24 – 31 January 2026 12 – 5pm
Bridewell Studios & Gallery, 101 Prescot Street, Liverpool L7 8UL
